


The Trick is not to Look Down

by AntivanCrafts



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: M/M, Offscreen character death, featuring a firelord being a gaylord, it figures that my first foray into the fandom is a middle aged based fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 07:07:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10634793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntivanCrafts/pseuds/AntivanCrafts
Summary: Zuko has suffered many losses in his long life. Maybe it's time he got something, someone, back.





	

There were many things to be said about becoming firelord --that it was both an opportunity and a weight, a job Zuko had never thought he'd get, never wanted until he'd had no choice but to step up and be who his people, everyone’s people, needed him to be-- but what it was not was boring. The days and months and years passed by too quickly, filled with meetings with ambassadors and proclamations and decisions and a thousand and one movements in a dance that he was learning step by step, until he looked up one day to find silver threads shot through his hair and too many empty places beside him where people used to be.

Perhaps it was to be expected, then, that he was not to be allowed to accept this. Whenever he started to become resigned to an ill in his life, something was given to him to replace what had been taken. He may not like the exchange, often didn't, but even a firelord could not change the basic laws of the universe. All he could do was try to keep up. And fail at it.

This particular loss was Mai. Medicine had advanced since his childhood by leaps and bounds, but there was still only so much to be done. And that something was to hold the hand of the woman he had orbited around since childhood, in one way or another, and lie to her face. Tell her that it was going to be okay. That she would be fine.

Mai had closed her eyes with the heavy implication of rolling them. “You really are a terrible liar,” she'd said, and smiled without opening her eyes, for which he was grateful. Small mercies. She hadn't had to see the look on his face. “Can't just let someone die in peace, can you?”

No. He couldn't. He opened his mouth to say so, and she'd furrowed her brows. “This isn't something you can fix,” she said slowly, the paused, rolling words around her tongue. “And I'm not him,” she'd said abruptly, making his hand tighten where he'd rested it beside hers in the blankets. “Trying to save me won't bring him back.”

“I know that,” Zuko rasped.

“I don't know if you do,” she'd said, opening her eyes at last. And looking at her now, he wondered if he really did, too. “I am ready. It is time to rejoin Ty Lee. Your opinion really has very little to do with it.” That, at least, was familiar, had even earned a laugh or two, before he stopped laughing.

After that, things moved both quickly and far too slow. There were practical matters to attend to, assigning a replacement to take over the duties she had taken upon herself over the years, and less so practical.

All of it, if he had to be honest, was doing just what she'd said he had always done. Resisting each loss, not on its own merits, but because of what it represented. That wasn't fair to Mai, as it hadn't been to any of the others, but always, inevitably, he found his thoughts going to Jet, no matter how he tried to do otherwise. In his younger years, such thoughts had always focused on the specter of his mother, but after a certain point, his focus had changed, and he didn't know how to bring it back to how it had used to be, or even if he wanted it to.

And so it was that in one very wet and miserable spring morning, there came a knock on the door to his study. Zuko didn't look up, but he called out for whoever it was to enter, expecting a servant. What he hadn't expected was the door to open to a laugh, low and rusty as a disused hinge.

Zuko went very still and very quiet. He stared down at the letter he was drafting and wondered if he had fallen asleep at his desk again and was dreaming this. Wondered briefly what sins he had committed lately to deserve this before he picked up his pen where it had dropped and scattered a pinch of sand across ink that had spilled from the tip. “Do you have an appointment?” He asked after a pause weighed heavy with words he'd ached to say and those he had not, his voice studiously light.

That got another laugh, closer this time. “Yeah, I do. Might be a bit late, but the way I figure it, the invitation I had doesn't expire.”

Zuko looked up at last, then regretted it. Jet looked the same, except where he didn't. Zuko swallowed heavily. “If you weren't dead,” he said slowly, “then where have you been? And why didn't-” He shut his mouth quickly, but other, sharper words sat heavy on his tongue, tasting like ash.

Jet switched the blade of grass he still somehow had in his mouth from one side to the other. “Got a lot of things to do when you've been declared dead,” he said with a shrug that was irritatingly casual. “Some of those things might have to do with avoiding the new firelord, yeah, but can you blame me?”

Zuko did not look away, but he wanted to. Because no, he couldn't. Wanted to, but part of being an effective leader was questioning yourself. And he just so happened to have perfected that fine art long ago. “That's not an answer.”

“Nope,” Jet agreed, waking around the desk. He was wider than he had been when Zuko had last trailed his hands up the thigh now bracing on the edge of his desk, had put on layers of muscle that Zuko very deliberately did not look at. He kept on writing, knowing it would irritate Jet, but something about it felt right, or close enough to it to taste. “You going to look at me?” Jet asked into the silence. “Be a shame to waste a face this pretty.”

Zuko tore his eyes away from the letter almost against his will and up towards the scars twisting Jet’s smile into a grimace. They were old, well worn, and Zuko could hazard a guess as to how he'd gotten it. Words seemed so very hard to grasp just now, harder still when Jet reached out a hand that fell short of actually touching him.

Zuko watched it fall, something cold and sharp working its way between his ribs, and then he surprised himself by bridging the gap between them and picking up Jet’s hand. He did not entwine their fingers or let it curl around his, merely held it as one would something dangerous and fragile all at once, but held it he did. “I've wasted a lot of things,” he said, thinking not just of Jet but of Mai, of his mother and uncle and a thousand thousand opportunities that had passed him by. He didn't intend for this, for him, to do the same. “Maybe,” he said tentatively, not quite looking at Jet, “I would like to try something new.”

“Something new, or something old?” In Zuko’s experience, they were often the same thing, and he said so. “You,” Jet snorted, “think too much.” But his voice was warm, and his other hand on Zuko’s cheek was warmer still. “Think that's not something I’d mind getting used to again, if you don't,” Jet said, more quietly. “Had a long time to get used to the idea of your being you, and. My being me, I guess.”

Zuko wanted to say that Jet was better off than he was there, in some respects, but instead leaned into the touch, eyes fluttering closed. It was exactly the way he'd remembered it, and he eased out a long shudder. Too much had been won and lost in the years stretching between them, and he detested that a gentle touch was to be his downfall. Detested, and sank into it with a bone deep gratitude that had him turning his hand to run his fingers up Jet’s bare arm the way he'd wished he could for years, and maybe, for now, that would be enough.

Learning new steps, and forgetting old ones, one by one. Yes, that was not such a bad way to spend what time was granted to him. 


End file.
